If reality is a simulation, isn’t the idea that reality is a simulation itself a simulation? Then reality must be real – right? If only it were that simple.
Each age builds its own cosmology out of its most advanced machines and keeps the old myths running in the background. Watchmakers gave us the watch universe; industrial age, body engine of classic forces; now, in the age of computing, quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence, a growing number of thoughtful people doubt that reality itself is a very complex program.
It cannot be denied that the supreme aim of all theory is to make the basic irreducible elements as simple and as few as possible, without sacrificing an adequate representation of the single data of experience. – Albert Einstein (1933)
Nick Bostrom’s argument is a trilemma: humanity may disappear before the posthuman stage, posthuman civilizations rarely simulate ancestors, or we’re almost at one (Bostrom, 2003)—which seems to be what it aims to prove. The cultural case is even higher: Elon Musk estimates the odds of us living in a “primary reality” as “one in a billion” (with Kara Swisher, 2016); Neil deGrasse Tyson says the probability “may be very high” (American Museum of Natural History, 2016); The Matrix (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999) made him a modern legend. repression and freedom is awakening from a cheat to a harsher but truer reality. The hypothesis works in the opposite direction.
Take it more seriously for what it says about the universe than about us—perhaps it’s a way of escaping the most pressing problems, existence, meaning, death, by thinking none of it is real.
Let’s say it’s true. It doesn’t change much in everyday life – try telling the gas station attendant that you don’t have to pay because nothing is real – except for one thing: living things aren’t as alive as we think they are. David Chalmers disputes this conclusion. “Virtual reality is real reality,” he writes, and “Life in virtual worlds can, in principle, be as good as life outside virtual worlds” (Chalmers, 2022, p. xviii). His point is that image and persona are not the same, but that a well-executed virtual life can be real rather than fake. Still, looking requires a concession: the aliveness that one knows from within, at the bottom, may need to tread the felt line between calculating and living being and fantastical image.
Let’s say it’s wrong. Then this metaphysics was carried, clothed, as a belief artificial intelligence and combined with the belief that machines are also alive—providing the supernatural of reality and freeing us from being animals in the world. A tougher explanation, but more likely; more simply, according to Occam’s razor.
Escape from reality
The impulse to question the world—perhaps to avoid physicality—is ancient and wears many guises. About Plato’s Cave education and knowledge, prisoners take a shadow for the real (Plato, 375 BC/1992, Book VII). Descartes’ thread is a device of methodological skepticism (Descartes, 1641/1996, Meditation I). Putnam’s brain in Watt is not about cosmology, but about information and skepticism (Putnam, 1981, ch. 1). Zhuangzi is not sure if he had a butterfly in his dream or not to dream explores it, perspective and transformation (Zhuangzi, 2013, Chapter 2). Scholars read the simulation hypothesis along these lines – as a “new techno-scientific religious narrative” (Virk, 2025).
It does them a disservice to teach them all that reality is a dream; but everyone asks if appearances can be deceiving in a deeper sense. The simulation hypothesis is the latest, most literal idea, with a scientific wrapper that matches our technological metaphors. Yet older views that relativize the self or the world usually associate the view with morality, the discipline of compassion, or a concern for how to live. This code has no such code: it offers a metaphysics of the supernatural and leaves very open about how we relate to each other. This gap can grow dangerously large.
Little is known about who believed it or why. Evidence is scarce: literature review found no validated measure or representative study of simulation belief; A 2026 Commerce survey found that 22% of American adults thought it was at least likely (7% very much, 15% somewhat), while 23% were unaware of the concept. openness skewing young and male (Polls & Insights, 2026).
Distinguish between two things: accepting a hypothesis as an idea – a probability assigned to a coffee – and feeling that the world is not so real. Some experience the latter as derealization: not the real reality that remains unchanged until the test of reality (American Psychiatric Union, 2022). This is a symptom, not a position, and nothing here suggests that the belief in simulation arises from derealization; most similarity is a research question. My suspicion is that since no interpretation has been found, it can work as a hypothesis projection – internal abnormality read into the cosmos.
Death Be not proud
It may lie beneath rejection death Ernest Becker argued that much of culture is a death-retention mechanism (Becker, 1973); the hypothesis suggests a modern version – not an afterlife, but an ill-defined higher life (if you will), a higher plane where one was never alive and therefore could never die.
Erich Fromm examined the tension between pro-life and anti-life positions—mostly the horrors of the last century and the use of technology—through a lens we can apply here. He installed biophilialove for the living, as opposed to a necrophilic orientation toward death, the inanimate, and mechanics (Fromm, 1964, 1973). When does a computational metaphor favor the mechanical over the living?
The latest research is based on this. One study linked existential nihilism to decreased well-being in both campus and online nihilism-community samples (Crammond et al., 2026); another found it predicted commit suicide Thinking among 775 students across three waves even after accounting for meaning in life and depressive symptoms (Kyron et al., 2025). Neither shows that confidence in the simulation leads to either outcome, but explores the overlap.
If the world is only described, will the other people become non-player characters whose cruelty leads to nothing? Going out for repairs may be preferred; and where nothing is ultimately true, there is less common ground for truth, and less demand for common humanity.
Stranger danger
What can be said without more research is limited by epistemic modesty. We are often the manifestation of the processes that interest us most. We can only understand what the human brain has expanded or otherwise allowed us to understand. Thinking about whether reality is a simulation is itself a living, conscious act, but believing in a hypothesis is a matter of faith that sounds perhaps scientific.
The hypothesis caught the cultural zeitgeist. Could it be true—the universe is some kind of giant program—or is the idea just born out of metaphors thrown out by rapidly advancing computing and AI? In my view, this is more of a defense, in line with a long line of unproven, largely metaphysical responses to existential anxiety. Old wine in new pixels.
